"You know what they say about men who hang around women's lavatories.They're asking to have their illusions shattered."

- Georgina to Albert, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

We invite contributions for the edited collection Toilet Papers: TheGendered Construction of Public Toilets.

Public toilets are amenities with a functional, even a civic, purpose.Yet they also act as the unconscious of public spaces. They can be ahaven: a place to regain composure, to 'check one's face,' or to have aprivate chat. But they are also sexually-charged and transgressivespaces that shelter illicit sexual practices and act as a culturalrepository for taboos and fantasies.

This collection will work from the premise that public toilets, far frombeing banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped bynotions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division. Indeed,public toilets are among the very few openly segregated spaces incontemporary Western culture, and the physical differences between'gentlemen' and 'ladies' remains central to (and is further naturalizedby) their design. As such, they provide a fertile ground for criticalwork interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body,sexuality, privacy, and technology can be formed in public space andinscribed through design.

We welcome papers which explore the cultural meanings, histories, andideologies of the public toilet as a gendered space. Any subject isappropriate: toilet design and signage, toilet humour and euphemisms,personal narratives and legal cases, as well as art sited in publictoilets. We invite submissions in the format of traditional academicpapers of no more than 7000 words (including footnotes).

We also welcome the submissions of design and art projects that exposethe gendered nature of the 'functional' toilet spaces and objects.

Completed articles and projects should be directed to the editor atgershenson_at_judnea.umass.edu. All submissions must be received viaelectronic file no later than January 15, 2006. We encourage prospectiveauthors to contact the editors with questions about submissions.